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Saturday, January 17, 2015

Chapter 1: A Funny Thing Happened...

(Just decided to publish a few chapters from a draft of a book I've written called 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Growing Up'. Let me know what you think and if you'd like to see more!)‘Gudia. Come here. Read this!’
I glanced up towards her. It was no use telling my mother not to call me by that
ghastly pet name. She was currently giggling about something as she read from a
book. What was she up to now, I wondered, but abandoned my own reading to
scoot on over to her like a good obedient daughter.
My mother was shaking with the silent laughter that meant she was really
tickled. She handed me her book and said ‘Go on. Read.’
What was this, now? Hang on, this was one of the adult books. I knew because I
had seen it amongst the other adult books on the high shelf in my parents
bedroom that we had been warned to stay away from and which of course, I
regularly nosed through when my parents were away at work. I looked at her
uncertainly, but she nodded and pointed, ‘This paragraph right here.’
Okayyy. Fine. I read quickly. It was a paragraph about a guy who appeared to be
undergoing some sort of medical check up. I frowned as I read, mouthing the
words silently and unconsciously starting to read aloud towards the end.
‘...They then held us by the testicles and instructed us to ‘Cough’. There was one
unfortunate fellow who heard the instruction as ‘Off’, and he applied himself to
taking off with as much speed as he could muster from that crouching position.
They were still rubbing him with ice when I left.’’
My mother went into paroxysms of laughter again as I finished reading. I smiled
politely, waiting for the shaking to stop.
‘Isn’t that hilarious?’ said Mom when she’d caught her breath.
‘Very.’ I agreed, and then hesitated ‘Er, Ma?’
‘Yes, dear?’ Mom said indulgently.
‘What’s testicles?’
At this, Mother dear stopped laughing all of a sudden. She appeared to be seeing
me for the first time and examined me closely. She then demanded. ‘How old are
you?’
‘Twelve.’ Come on, she knew that, surely. I knew she could be a little woolly
headed at times, and I was after all only the middle child, but still.
Mom opened her mouth as if to say something and then closed it again. She
frowned. And then the frown cleared.
She informed me in a very matter-of-fact, decisive way.

‘If you’re twelve, then you already know, of course.’
I didn’t. How was I to know? No one ever told me anything. But once my mother
said ‘of course.’... That was it – the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, and there was no point arguing it. Without offering anything else that
might have been mistaken for an actual explanation, Mother dear turned back to
her funny adult book and was soon shaking with silent laughter again.
Taking this correctly to be the dismissal that it was, I turned back rather
morosely to my own Sweet Valley Twins book.
Somehow it didn’t seem very exciting anymore.
*****
My mother hadn’t always been weird. She had been warm, affectionate, loving
and a whole bunch of other good stuff, but it had all gone out the window the
minute that my sister came along. At least, that was kind of the way that my own
traumatized four year old self fondly remembered it.
Like I said, no one ever told me anything – especially in those days, and this was
1983 and a half. In today’s day and age, we have access to books like Topsy and
Tim meet The New Baby, but in those days, there was nothing. Nada. Zero. The
concept of telling a child that a sibling was in the offing was unheard of – children
didn’t need to know anything!
Of course, there is a remote possibility that some attempt was made to apprise
me of the impending arrival, but I was perhaps too distracted by a butterfly or
something to register the fact. A very remote possibility, though and I only
mention it in a bleak, martyr-like attempt at fairness. I was no moron.
As it happened, Mother Dear suddenly disappeared off the scene for several days.
After a couple of days when it came to my notice, I made my enquiries only to be
informed that she would be home soon enough and that could I please refrain
from dropping kishmish all over the floor like that.
I must admit that when I said earlier that I was no moron, I may have been a little
biased favorably toward myself . After all, in later years I was informed that I
used to spend hours in a little play pen as a toddler, solemnly picking up and
consuming little bits of kishmish that our enterprising maid Saraswati had
strewn about in zig zag patterns on the play pen floor. This apparently kept me
out of harm’s way and allowed the harried old lady to get on with her work. My
parents seemed to think this was a quaint and admirable solution. In a later era,
we might have considered this ground to fire a maid’s ass, but they simply patted
Saraswati on the back and went off to their own busy day at work.
It was only my grandfather, ubiquituously known as Papa, who appeared to think
that I deserved to be enlightened as to my mother’s whereabouts.

‘She is in the hospital.’ He said with a huge grin. For a moment, my love and
respect for him wavered. Why did he look so happy about the fact that Mother
was sick? He continued, his smile turning dreamy. ‘And she’s going to come back
with Chand.’
This further mystified me. Mother was in the hospital - and she was going to
come back with the moon? That was very strange and I couldn’t wrap my mind
around it at all. I was very disturbed that night as I went to sleep. I needed my
mother to say her usual ‘Goodnight. Sweet Dreams. I love you.’
But the very next day, my traitor of a mother returned with a whole new baby,
whom everybody affectionately referred to as Chand or Chanda. I could see the
writing on the wall: I had been ousted from her affections forever – it was easy to
tell. She never let that thing alone so that I could have a go at it. I could only stand
by helplessly as the little puckered-up stranger raised hell and carved out its
place right in the center of the whole universe. I watched as my mother fed that
baby - it looked as if the feeding was hurting her. My hatred of the thing grew. I
knew it was evil from the moment I saw it.
My brother didn’t seem perturbed by the new arrival, just vaguely amused by it.
He was more interested in his cricket and bullying of the neighborhood kids and
hogging the television. It never occurred to me that he simply might have already
been through this earlier when I was born. He was older than me by three and a
half years, exactly the same age difference between me and the new It. We were
now a well-spaced out family. And also a – well, spaced-out family.
*****
That little stranger had grown up now to be a skinny eight year old who was no
longer a stranger. Well, no stranger than the rest of us. In fact, she had turned out
to be a pretty good companion for me; my sister and I were always together,
constantly inventing games for our own amusment.
Most of the games were invented by me, but the point was that I finally had a
willing compatriot and partner in crime or to put it another way, a guinea pig
with the slight advantage that she could talk and therefore protested at times. It
was true that the poor child was often bullied into being the scapegoat in these
childhood ‘games’, but I tended to wipe away all feelings of guilt with the thought
that I was greatly contributing to her education. As the more experienced sibling,
I told myself sanctimoniously, it was up to me to share life experience with her so
that she would not have to suffer the various troubles I’d seen. Besides,
sometimes I even switched with her, so that she could pretend to be the pet-
owner and have the pleasure of walking me as a dog instead.I, of course, was the
majestically named Tipu Sultan. I think her dog-name was Bonbon or equivalent.
Since these were the days before iPads and iPhones or anything even remotely as
mind-numbingly absorbing as these devices, we found ourselves with a fair
degree of free time. My parents were both working and had limited time for us.

My father was a doctor. He was a dermatologist and it was a long time before I
understood what the good Dr. Lal actually did for a living. Mother dear was in
Customs & Central Excise and to this day I’m not very sure of what she did until
the day she retired. We all exhibited a remarkable lack of curiosity about each
other’s doings but co-existed, sometimes amiably, in our shared infrastructure,
our home in Pandara Park, just a little off Pandara Road.
If ever my sister and I were bored, and there were many such moments, we
would take the problem to Mother dear, only to be summarily informed
‘Educated children are never bored.’ Having solved the problem so efficiently for
us, she would go back to whatever it was that she was doing: which on the rare
occasions that she was home, was either cooking, reading, knitting or Sorting.
Sorting was a fascinating activity – whether you were blissfully occupied with it
like my mother, or simply passive observers like my sister and I. It was my
mother’s lifelong belief that nothing should ever be actually thrown away, and
that if it was meant to leave your home, it would eventually disintegrate.
However, in order to manage all the rubbish that accumulated as a result of such
a wonderful principle, regular Sorting had to be done. Thus was born the concept
of Sorting Saturdays, which wasn’t really the official terminology until much later.
For us, it was more like ‘What the heck is wrong with Mama’ day and we watched
curiously as she lovingly rearranged a chosen section of the messy house.
Somedays it was our book shelf, consisting largely of Archies and Hardy Boys and
she painstakingly arranged the books in alphabetical or numerical order, which
we would ensure would last for about a day and a half. At the end of Sorting
Saturday, Mother dear would heave a sigh of satisfaction while the rest of us,
including my father often huffed and puffed in resentment at having been
ignored by her for so many hours at time. It didn’t seem to matter to Mom that
the sorted area looked exactly the same as before, minus perhaps, to give her
some credit, one layer of dust, accidentally removed as a result of her
enthusiastic fiddling.
Since my sister and I were normal children who gained no pleasure from making
the world around us a tidier place to live in, we were left to our own devices on
weekends. I had stoically taken charge of the situation at a fairly early age, and by
now we already had a fair repertoire of games to choose from in order to keep
ourselves occupied.
‘Want to play German-Referee?’ I asked my sister conspiratorially, as if it were a
rare treat for her, rather than the game we played every other day.
This was a rather unique Game invented by Yours Truly. I, as the Referee was the
one who would glide about on skates while hanging onto the collar of my sister,
who, as German, was assigned the task of building up to a certain speed before
suddenly wrenching herself free and veering off, leaving me hurtling towards
some corner, or wall, or door, and on one or two occasions a rather surprised and
disapproving Dad. The game was incomplete without the pretence that we had
somehow ‘lost’ each other by mistake and wailing dramatically ‘Germannn....’ ...
‘Germannn...’ and ‘Referreee!’ The names of the principal characters in this

singular game were derived from one of the only movies we ever had the good
fortune to see on the VCR that my brother proclaimed as his own, a movie about
Football called ‘Escape to Victory.’ We understood nothing of the movie since
Abhimanyu had already viewed it at a friend’s house and used our own TV simply
to review his favorite parts, meditatively forwarding or rewinding to those bits -
including one Bicycle Kick of Pele’s that I had unsuccessfully tried to emulate
myself. But we had cottoned on to the fact there were people called Germans and
Referees in the movie, and the names caught our fancy for our little skating game.
‘All right.’ My sister grumbled. As German, she kind of had the short end of the
stick but being an innately good sport, she would soon get into the spirit of
things. She didn’t have skates of her own yet. In our family, every novelty item
was bought only once for the oldest child, and then years later when he had cast
it aside, it would come to me. I had yet to cast anything aside in the direction of
my sister, and it would be a few years before she had her own skates. For now,
being German was the best she could aspire for. Her countenance brightened
considerably at the realization that this was also yet another God-given
opportunity to send me whizzing out the front door and maybe even down the
stairs from our first floor flat.
And so another few pleasant hours passed on that lazy weekend. Mother busy
with Sorting, Abhimanyu in something akin to a stupor, forwarding and
rewinding the tape of Escape to Victory until my father finally lost it and
banished him from my parents bedroom, which of course was the only place
which could house the television. And me and Chanda alternating between
barking at each other and filling the house with our cries of German-Referree,
while Kajal, who had replaced her aunt Saraswati some years back stood
muttering malevolently to herself in the kitchen about how things were so much
better on weekdays when she was allowed to actually do her work without the
interfering presence of the crazy members of this Family.